Political and Economic Challenges to Creating a Sustainable Agriculture
There are many barriers that stand in the way of established conventional farmers who want to adopt sustainable techniques, and young people who want to become sustainable farmers. For established farmers, barriers include: Concerns about transition costs
- PDF / 175,281 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 25 Downloads / 212 Views
Political and Economic Challenges to Creating a Sustainable Agriculture
Abstract There are many barriers that stand in the way of established conventional farmers who want to adopt sustainable techniques, and young people who want to become sustainable farmers. For established farmers, barriers include: • • • • • • • •
Concerns about transition costs Termination of government subsidies Lack of tariffs that protect production Lack of knowledge about sustainable techniques Need to break ties with conventional farmers Loss of investment in conventional equipment Need to increase labor force Family is risk-averse For young people who want to farm sustainably, barriers include:
• • • • • • •
Regulations that are designed for industrial farmers Price of Land Leasing land is risky – improvements might increase lease payments. Marketing. Raising produce leaves little time for marketing Competition from other young organic growers Getting a loan Help from Colleges of Agriculture has limited applicability. Very little local research • Need for specialization to develop a niche market Barriers that affect both types of farmers include: • • • • • •
Vested interests that support industrial agriculture Reductionistic science that does not answer sustainability questions Misdirected government policies that subsidize unsustainable farming Failure of the economic system to recognize environmental services The law of supply and demand The discount rate discourages farmers from investing in sustainability
C.F. Jordan, An Ecosystem Approach to Sustainable Agriculture: Energy Use Efficiency in the American South, Environmental Challenges and Solutions 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6790-4_3, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
63
64
3 Political and Economic Challenges to Creating a Sustainable Agriculture
• The abundance of resources encourages people to waste them • Attitude that nature needs to be conquered Keywords Barriers to sustainable agriculture • Challenges for sustainable agriculture • Agricultural tariffs • Agricultural subsidies • Economics and sustainable agriculture
3.1
Introduction
The history of agriculture has shown that energy in agricultural systems has been used inefficiently and unsustainably. It might seem that those concerned with agriculture, from farmers to tribal chiefs to kings and governments might have learned something about increasing efficiency during several thousand years of experience. Perhaps they did. However, their survival depended upon economic growth, which in turn depended on using energy to maximize power, not efficiency. Maximizing power was the key to winning the competition for land, resources, and women. In maximizing power, a certain amount of energy input is wasted (Odum and Pinkerton 1955). It was this waste of power that caused agriculture to become unsustainable. Today, many farmers understand that energy intensive agriculture is the cause of unsustainability. Despite the advantages of techniques for making agriculture more sustainable, there are powerful social
Data Loading...
